Motorcycle Explorer October 2014 Issue 2 | Page 28

Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent
Hair salon stop?
Then I’d watched him turn right and vanish into the
darkness, the last familiar face I would see before
my journey began.
It was a Sunday morning and the pavements were
splashed with colour: piles of fuchsia dragon fruit,
ripe green mangoes, scented white lilies, juicy
yellow pineapples. Women strolling in floral
pyjamas added to the kaleidoscopic effect. Amidst
it all people slurped their morning bowls of pho
and drank gritty black coffee. No one took the
slightest bit of notice of a foreigner on a pink
moped, driving up busy Đi?n Biên Ph? Street and
stopping opposite the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum.
Passionate idealist, founder of Vietnamese
communism, Stalinist dictator, revolutionary,
visionary, charmer, saint, demi-god, hero, bringer of
light – Uncle Ho was the founder of modern
Vietnam. President of North Vietnam from 1954
until his death in 1969, Ho was driven by a single
belief, ‘The Vietnamese country is one, the
Vietnamese people are one. Rivers may run dry,
mountains may erode, but the truth is
unshakeable.’ It was this conviction that led him to
risk everything in a war against the South.
"Opinions, broadcasts and
publications criticising Ho are
ruthlessly suppressed"
Ho died six years before his lifelong dream of an
independent, unified Vietnam was realised. Upon
his death, contrary to his final wishes for a simple
cremation, his body was embalmed and later
placed in the specially built mausoleum. Forty-
four years on, more than fifteen thousand people
still file past Ho’s waxy body every week. The
image of his long, ascetic face with its Confucian
beard and sunken cheeks is on every note of
currency and in every public building. Opinions,
broadcasts and publications criticising Ho are
ruthlessly suppressed. Although the outdated
Party is losing its grip on the hearts and minds of
the people, Uncle Ho – a sobriquet he gave himself
– is the glue that still holds the communist ideal
together.